In those days it was difficult to get a book to read in Nairobi. My bookseller would tell me that he had just got a beautiful consignment of books out from home, and then place before me a pile of such poor printed matter as seemed a shame to have good, seaworthy ships bring out. All the same it has twice there happened to me to pick up a book by an entirely unknown author, and the day after to write home telling my people to note down the author’s name. The first of the two was Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow, the second Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Now Huxley’s Little Mexican was published. Among the tales of this book is the story ‘Young Archimedes’, telling of a little boy with a genius for mathematics, by a vain and silly adoptive mother prevented from studying it and driven into such despair that in the end he throws himself from a balcony and dies. The night after I had read it I woke up almost as terrified as when I had left the baby bushbuck Lulu to her fate in the hands of Kikuyu totos. Within the following week I managed to scrape money together, and had Abdullahi sent off to the high school of Mombasa. He was very happy there, and his teachers wrote me that he was progressing steadily and beautifully.

Abdullahi travelled up from Mombasa a couple of times to visit us on the farm. He wore the clothes in which he had left us, and which by now had become somewhat scanty in length and short at the sleeves; he was evidently saving up his modest pocket-money for more books. These holiday visits after a year were rendered difficult by the fact that Farah had married, so that it had become illegal for Abdullahi to stay beneath his roof. In Somaliland, as in Jewry, when a man dies his younger brother marries his widow in order to raise up his seed, and I gathered that the close connection between a youthful brother and sister-in-law is considered dangerous as a possible incentive to fratricide. In a nation of such strict loyalty in family affairs the rule betrays a strange belief in the fatality of passion. I was sorry about the taboo, for I felt that Abdullahi and Fathima, of the same age and both clear-eyed and easy-going, would have got on very well together en tout bien tout honneur.

When I left the country, Abdullahi did not care to stay there any longer either, but went back to Somaliland. From there he wrote to me, and I wrote back. He had not got Kamante’s gift of letter-writing; his epistles to Denmark, beyond the fact that he was alive, gave little but a firm determination to hold on to me.